The outgoing secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, may be a brilliant choice to serve as the new president of the University of California. But how can we tell? And how, for that matter, can the Board of Regents tell? Half of the regents haven't even had a chance to talk to her about how she would approach the job - a job that involves 10 campuses, 170,000 faculty and staff members and more than 220,000 students. That's why they should delay their Thursday vote on her appointment - which comes less than a week after the selection was announced - and instead engage in a more public and transparent hiring process that will assure Californians that this unorthodox decision is the right one. It has become more common in recent years for colleges to pick leaders with nonacademic backgrounds.

Seth Ronquillo is a fourth-year film and linguistics major at UCLA. He is co-chair of IDEAs, a group for students in the country illegally. Like many immigrant rights activists, he holds Janet Napolitano responsible for the increasing number of deportations during her tenure as Department of Homeland Security secretary. He calls her nomination to be head of the UC system "frustrating" and "scary. " "It shouldn't intimidate us. It should be a source of strength," Ronquillo said.

Reaction was broad and swift Thursday to the announcement by UC president Janet Napolitano that she would allocate $5 million in university funds to help the system's estimated 900 students who entered the country illegally. The issue of how to treat those who don't have proper immigration papers is a hot one for Napolitano. Critics contend that, in her previous job as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, she oversaw an increase in deportations and they have protested her selection as UC president.

The Arizona House of Representatives voted Monday to require Gov. Janet Napolitano to follow through on her proposal to increase the number of National Guard troops helping crack down on illegal immigration at the state's border with Mexico. The lawmakers also agreed to provide $5 million in state money for the plan by the governor, who had asked the Pentagon to pick up the costs and said her ideas for using troops would be impossible without complete federal funding. Republican state Rep.

Re "Why the rush on Napolitano?," Editorial, July 17, and "Regents confirm Napolitano," July 19 The Times' editorial urging the University of California's Board of Regents to take more time in evaluating Janet Napolitano for the post of UC president - advice the regents, who confirmed her selection Thursday, did not follow - rightly points to some of the problems with her selection. But there are more, suggested by her record as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

A few hundred immigration activists descended Sunday on Pomona College to protest Arizona's controversial anti-illegal immigration law and the policies of commencement speaker Janet Napolitano, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Demonstrators said Napolitano has continued to expand immigration programs that they say were precursors to Arizona's law, which requires police officers to check the immigration status of anybody they stop and suspect may be here illegally.

In picking Janet Napolitano as the new University of California president, the regents are in ways falling in line with a trend: the hiring of non-academics to head colleges. A survey last year by the American Council on Education found that 1 in 5 college presidents don't come from academia. But the traditional path among these non-traditional hires is to pick from the business world on the assumption that financial savvy will help colleges bring in new money and manage what they have in better ways.

Responding to protests from state leaders in the Southwest, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has offered tighter coordination between federal agencies and police in Arizona and New Mexico to deal with problems caused by illegal immigration. He sent a letter to Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano on Monday accepting her offer of state police officers to help federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents quickly deport undocumented immigrants.

Faced with the international outbreak of swine flu and mounting concern about the threat to Americans, the Obama administration is relying on a member of the president's Cabinet with almost no background in medicine: Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security. Over the last two days, Napolitano has been a constant presence on television and in news reports, urging calm and offering reassurance while laying out the facts and the government's response to the outbreak.

The people behind Arizona's new anti-immigrant statute have at least one thing right: This mean-spirited law was enacted because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to address the immigration system's moral and functional failures. On Sunday, the state's largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic, took the unprecedented step of giving its entire front page over to an editorial making exactly that point. "The federal government is abdicating its duty on the border.